


Tatemae

by kerlin



Category: Alias
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-31
Updated: 2010-08-31
Packaged: 2017-10-11 09:08:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/110750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kerlin/pseuds/kerlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>And they said every one to his fellow, Come, and let us cast lots, that we may know for whose cause this evil is upon us. So they cast lots, and the lot fell upon Jonah.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Tatemae

**Author's Note:**

> title from a Japanese term that means, roughly, "the reality that everyone professes to be true, even though they may not privately believe it."

Jonah Price was a quiet kind of guy.

You could ask him what he thought about problems in Africa, or the debate about gay marriage, or even something so simple as whether or not it was really fair that Joe Cavanaugh had strong-armed them all into donating to the scholarship fund that everyone knew was just to send his daughter up to the university at Madison. You could ask him what he thought of the weather, what he'd watched on television last night, or if he thought the woman at the other end of the bar was good-looking.

You could ask, but you probably wouldn't get an answer. Not a real answer, anyway.

He was a good man. Nobody disputed that. He paid his union dues right on time, he always looked the other way when you came back a few minutes late from a cigarette break, and he could hold his liquor with the best of them. He laughed at the right jokes and ogled the right women and even cheered for the Packers.

But if you stopped and thought about the last time you'd heard him give a real, honest-to-God opinion, you could scratch your head and equivocate all day, but really, you'd come up empty.

Jonah didn't have opinions.

This was something everyone realized, afterwards. They traded theories over the counter of the deli, in the bleachers of the high school game, while bellied up to the bar.

Jonah had existed in the space between everyone else. He'd agreed with just about everything. He hadn't been curious about anything, hadn't ever gone beyond the social norms of courtesy queries, had never offered up any really compelling information.

He'd had a hesitant smile, they decided later. Like he had to make sure it was okay to smile first. Those electric blue eyes of his had watched everything, taken in everything, and evaluated it before he decided whether or not it was safe to say something.

Obviously, they should have known. Done something. That much was clear. Because even as much as he had been so secretive, he'd been a good kind of guy.

Or at least they'd thought. Because the good guys didn't disappear, did they? They didn't just not show up to work one day and not answer the phone. Their apartments weren't trashed when the landlord finally unlocked the door. They didn't have pictures of themselves with beautiful women no one had ever seen before hidden away in their sock drawers. They didn't have a tin full of money and a passport with someone else's name.

"Always the quiet ones," everybody agreed, voicing the cliché with a sharp nod of their heads, reaffirming their faith in the old adages.

Jonah Price had been a quiet one.


End file.
